Commentary - Dan Gainor: Tax, regulation battle just warming up

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - It’s sleeting outside, and I’m watching the ice build up on my car.

None of that is any surprise. It’s winter. The ideal time to sit by the fire and hear tales of famine, war, fire, flood, apocalypse and global warming.

Anything beats talking about the Ravens. Besides, it’s a global conversation.

Al Gore just flew to Norway to get his Nobel Prize for talking about it. And thousands of delegates from around the world just flew to the tropical paradise of Bali to talk about it. None of them admits they were leaving pollution in their wake or partying in the sun while we freeze. We should expect such scolds to be hypocrites, as well.

If you are a businessman, a taxpayer or just an ordinary citizen, then this is the most important topic I can cover. Not because the Bay is about to flood and we’ll all be swimming with the crabs. Even the United Nations “experts” predict no such thing.

It’s because climate change regulation and taxes are the biggest power grab for local, state, federal and global governments in history. No matter what Mother Nature can do to destroy our lives and our homes, politicians can do it better.

I imagine Gov. Martin O’Malley’s Irish eyes must be smilin’ at the prospect of new and unchecked power over everything. He’s already making plans — plans that could devastate state businesses more than his $1.5 billion in taxes. His Maryland Commission on Climate Change has brought in outside eco-alarmists to dictate how we live our lives.

Next, they’ll change those lives. The commission is “poised to propose the nation’s toughest carbon cap when the legislature returns next month,” according to The Associated Press. Carbon output means business, growth and jobs — here and globally. Cut that in crazy ways and we pay one way through the nose.

What the commission and the Bali conference propose are incredible caps on carbon emissions — one of many so-called greenhouse gases some scientists link to global warming. We could debate the science all day. There are many scientists frozen out of the discussion who question lots of what the U.N. claims.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is the U.N. and lots of well-meaning, but utterly clueless enviro-nuts, are hell-bent on preventing a catastrophe … by causing one.

I wish I was joking. The Bali deal creates a timetable for some global pact by 2009. The expectation is that industrialized nations will have to cut carbon emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 or so, and we’re 25 percent above those levels now. Those cuts could wreck the U.S. economy.

We’re also supposed to pay to keep Third World nations from deforesting, pay to supply them with technology and pretty much everything else. Just one climate bill currently in Congress would cost every American man, woman and child almost $500 a year for the next 40 years.

No wonder the climate is warming. It’s all those politicians rubbing their greedy little hands together creating global friction.

Dan Gainor can be seen each week on Thursday afternoons on the new Fox Business Network. He is the T. Boone Pickens free market fellow at the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute, a career journalist and media commentator. He can be reached at gainorcolumn@gmail.com.

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